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| IT is a place where poets crown’d may feel the heart’s decaying; | |
| It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying. | |
| Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish: | |
| Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish. | |
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| O poets, from a maniac’s tongue was poured the deathless singing! | 5 |
| O Christians, at your Cross of hope, a hopeless hand was clinging! | |
| O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling, | |
| Groan’d inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling! | |
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| And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story, | |
| How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory, | 10 |
| And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed, | |
| He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted, | |
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| He shall be strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation, | |
| And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration; | |
| Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken, | 15 |
| Named softly as the household name of one whom God hath taken. | |
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| With quiet sadness and no gloom I learn to think upon him,— | |
| With meekness that is gratefulness to God whose heaven hath won him, | |
| Who suffer’d once the madness-cloud to His own love to blind him, | |
| But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him; | 20 |
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| And wrought within his shatter’d brain such quick poetic senses | |
| As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences. | |
| The pulse of dew upon the grass kept his within its number, | |
| And silent shadows from the trees refresh’d him like a slumber. | |
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| Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home-caresses, | 25 |
| Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses. | |
| The very world, by God’s constraint, from falsehood’s ways removing, | |
| Its women and its men became, beside him, true and loving. | |
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| And though, in blindness, he remain’d unconscious of that guiding, | |
| And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing, | 30 |
| He testified this solemn truth, while frenzy desolated, | |
| —Nor man nor nature satisfy whom only God created. | |
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| Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses | |
| And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses,— | |
| That turns his fevered eyes around—‘My mother! where ’s my mother?’— | 35 |
| As if such tender words and deeds could come from any other!— | |
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| The fever gone, with leaps of heart he sees her bending o’er him, | |
| Her face all pale from watchful love, the unweary love she bore him!— | |
| Thus, woke the poet from the dream his life’s long fever gave him, | |
| Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes, which closed in death to save him. | 40 |
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| Thus? oh, not thus! no type of earth can image that awaking, | |
| Wherein he scarcely heard the chant of seraphs, round him breaking, | |
| Or felt the new immortal throb of soul from body parted, | |
| But felt those eyes alone, and knew,—‘My Saviour! not deserted!’ | |
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| Deserted! Who hath dreamt that when the cross in darkness rested, | 45 |
| Upon the Victim’s hidden face, no love was manifested? | |
| What frantic hands outstretch’d have e’er the atoning drops averted? | |
| What tears have wash’d them from the soul, that one should be deserted? | |
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| Deserted! God could separate from his own essence rather; | |
| And Adam’s sins have swept between the righteous Son and Father. | 50 |
| Yea, once, Immanuel’s orphan’d cry his universe hath shaken— | |
| It went up single, echoless, ‘My God, I am forsaken!’ | |
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| It went up from the Holy’s lips amid his lost creation, | |
| That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation! | |
| That earth’s worst frenzies, marring hope, should mar not hope’s fruition, | 55 |
| And I, on Cowper’s grave, should see his rapture in a vision. | |
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